I am a very strong supporter of anti-discrimination laws. I made it a corporate policy at the companies I ran that anyone exercising their personal bigotry against another employee would be fired.

I was not an LGBTQ+ warrior, I just selfishly wanted the best workers I could find and what they did when they left work was their personal individual right to pursue happiness.

Where I push back is DEI and similar quota systems.

In contrast where I stand is best illustrated by my response to a dying HIV employee. In the 1980s, one of my gay employees was dying of advanced stage HIV. He had no place to go and wanted to keep coming to work. Several employees complained and said I should fire him. I responded, that unless they were planning to have sex with Roger, he was no danger to them, so if they could not handle his condition (HIIV), they should quit. If you looked at my history, LGBTQ+ employees experienced tremendous career growth at my companies.

I hope you don't take this the wrong way, but I sometimes think gay employees often have an advantage, since at the time most did not have children, so they were more likely to be workaholics that excelled in the workplace and thus earned disproportional promotions and wage increases. I am not suggesting they should not have families or that they should be workaholics, just that they disproportionately were and that gave them career advantages.

The reason I am a classical liberal and not a libertarian is that I do believe government has an important role in protecting people from harm and addressing and institutional bigotry.

But to do those roles, government should not engage in systemic racism or bigotry. Once you start playing the game "good bigotry" and "bad bigotry", you ultimately end up with "majority wins" and I value individual freedom and rights too much to want that type of society.